During the global response to COVID-19, the analogy of fighting a war was often used. In 2022, the world faced a different war altogether, an unprovoked Russian invasion of Ukraine. Since 2020 the world has faced these unprecedented shocks. Although we realise these events' health and economic...

We know that when collective emotions are prolonged, it leads not only to action (which could be negative) but also to the formation of identity, culture, or an emotional climate. Therefore, policymakers must understand how collective emotions react to macro-level shocks to mitigate potentially...

The COVID-19 pandemic is an example of an immense global failure to curb the spread of a pathogen and save lives. To indirectly protect people against a deadly virus, a population needs to achieve herd immunity, which is attained either through vaccination or prior infection. However, achieving...

It is well-established that a country's economic outcomes, including productivity, future income, and labour market performance, are profoundly influenced by the happiness of its people. Traditionally, survey data have been the primary source for determining people's happiness. However, this...

Happiness levels (states) are volatile and often fluctuate between a happy and unhappy state from one day to the next. The reasons for these shifts are mostly unobservable and not predictable. In this paper, we fit a Marko Switching Dynamic Regression Model (MSDR) to better understand the...

Social welfare payments (SWP) were designed with policy priority to transfer revenue to vulnerable groups, thereby addressing poverty and inequality. Previous studies have shown that SWPs alleviate poverty, but investigating their effect on well-being is sparse. We investigate the relationship...

Since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, many governments have implemented lockdown regulations to curb the spread of the virus. Though lockdowns do minimise the physical damage of the virus, there may be substantial damage to population well-being. Using a pooled dataset, this paper analyses...

Amidst the rapid global spread of Covid-19, many governments enforced country-wide lockdowns, with likely severe well-being consequences. The actions by governments triggered a debate on whether the well-being and economic costs of a lockdown surpass the benefits perceived from a lower infection...

This paper estimates Markov switching models with daily happiness (GNH) data from New Zealand for a period inclusive of the Covid-19 global health pandemic. This helps us understand the dynamics of happiness due to an external shock and provides valuable information about its future evolution....

This paper investigates the predictability of stock market movements using text data extracted from the social media platform, Twitter. We analyse text data to determine the sentiment and the emotion embedded in the Tweets and use them as explanatory variables to predict stock market movements....